25

CHAPTER 25: Red Riding Hood Sights Me

I sink the teddy bear in the water, seeing that there was no harm in cleaning it. It’s colour disintegrates in the water. She watches me, sitting far from the water when the blood pooled around her like a dress made of bitter liquid, stickier than water and taints everything. I saw how much that hurt her, that even behind the magic she had to live with was a girl who just wanted a life, a home, not this.

Not the inability to touch something that she clearly had as a child, “What were you before you became this?” I ask her, moving my fingers over the teddy bear and pausing when the water changes, fixing the tainted colour that was staining the aged teddy bear.

She doesn’t say a thing until I’ve finished and she just stands there in the cave, “Did you have a family?” I ask her, “Is that where you got the teddy? The bed? Those ornaments inside?” I ask her.

She stares, no colour in her eyes that doesn’t mix with the blood pouring from the midline of her head, ”She looked like you, my mother. Always wore her hair down, blonde strands that would float every time we went to the beach. She’d take me to see the seagulls, to find sea shells, to swim and how not to drown. Now all I am ever doing is drowning.” She speaks differently now, more casual, less like a rhyming witch that gives me the creeps.

"I remember how warm the sand was in the summer. So beautiful, it looked like stars in the light. Not like here. It wasn’t manufactured, everything was as natural as skin, flesh, bone and touch. She was so pretty. So full of life, sometimes when I see you, I remember, until you scowl and shove away those who treat you like a caged, untamed animal because you are one. You don’t let your wolf out. I don’t know why. It’s a part of you, a part that should be accepted.” She changed course of words.

“The way you accepted your situation?” I scoff, looking at her as I move back into the room, the teddy bear was warming in my hands, it soon became dry, I sat on the bed, she moved to the floor and pulled her legs up, wrapping her arms around them.

"I am in its shape and form, clearly I have accepted it.”

Perhaps she had a point.

I close my eyes, moving the teddy bear to the side, “How much do you know about the others? About the other high ranks in each clan.” I ask her.

She forms a circle of blood, transforming it into a sphere, ”Loyalty is but one factor of unity.”

“Great, you’ve gone back to being cryptic again.”

"I don’t care for the Alphas who strive for power, who fight for power. Not all of them are true to punishment like you seem to believe. Warner loves Alice, Serena leads the true pack, Martin...has accepted that you may never love him. Marcel fears death. Klein fears failure. Each of them so scared and so petrified that the Darkling blood provides security where there was none before. It’s a balance that needs to be made in society and Martin made it, Celestine. He is not just one mate of yours, he is but one piece of a puzzle who’s picture you still cannot make out.”

I stare at her, “Are you an oracle?”

“I was, in another life that I sometimes dream about. When I made one wrong decision that put me in this curse for centuries to come and centuries that have already been. The teddy wasn’t mine, it was to be my daughter’s.” Her confession has me stilling.

I look at her, “Daughter’s?”

"I was pretty once too. I had a loving man, a loving family, acceptance and loyalty and liberty when I thought there was none. She was born with the placenta around her neck. My first child died in my arms. That loving husband became nothing more than the cold shell of a man who wanted to be a father and I don’t blame for what he did next, for what he turned me into. A blood-ridden mess. Because with each miscarriage, came more heartbreak. The shattering of organs and bone. The curse I bear is a consequence of failure for the man I love.”

I kneel in front of her, “He was a coward.” Her story renders me to my knees.

“He was the one who failed. A curse can be broken, I just need you to tell me how.” I say to her, she was telling me she was human before this, that she had a name, she had a life.

"This curse is accepted, not suffered upon. He died before you were born. The only way to free a curse is to manipulate the one who made it, to change it using their words, but I had to promise not to remember those words. I accepted the fate of this, I have accepted my punishment.”

“It is not a punishment!”

"I wanted my child. I killed my child.”

I stare at her in disbelief, “Did he tell you this? Did he give you the fucking thought that you’re a failure if you cannot give birth. It is not a failure, it is not shameful, it is tragic and it happens, but it’s not in your control. It is not in anyone’s control. You can’t possibly accept this fate.” The blood was closing in on her.

"I wasn’t born like this. I wasn’t like this. Losing my child, tainting my world and splitting it in two. I accepted the fate of the curse as it struck my heart, tainted my being until clench and bone was no longer. It’s bitter and it hurts at first but when you get use to it, you’re powerful. The scars—gone, I’m no longer marked by this failure, just the teddy. The teddy is no longer tainted, it’s no longer stained. You cleaned her teddy.” She sounds grateful and it stings, just listening to it, her words linger in the air.

I swallow, “Your daughter...did you—did you name her?” I ask her softly.

She nods, ”My Elara. So beautiful, and strong. In my womb for nine months and four days. Each and every moment was treasured until the last, the very thing giving her life killed her. Can you imagine? Killing your own child?” The question would take anyone off guard.

I don’t answer that.

Who could?

“You didn’t.” I whisper.

“...so trusting...”I thought I heard her say, “...I did. And this is the price for the life I could not give, so the life I must bear. It’s a cycle, something that must flow in order to keep the axis of your world turning. Can’t you feel that with your mates?” She asks me.

I still where I stand, “Mates? You can only have one.”

She studies me, ”Poor, poor girl. Gullible till the end.” She whispers.

I frown, “End? What end? You’re immortal under this curse, aren’t you?” Or does she age? Is it slower than the rest of us? Is it a change in the grain of time, each movement she sees centuries of in the making. But in here, she’s trapped in something of one of the greatest illusions I’ve seen. A world of monsters, but those monsters aren’t just born. They can be created. Formed by another.

Was she an innocent before she became what people used against others? What she used against her own enemies? Is that the case here?

I stare at her, the pain she went through, losing a daughter is different than never knowing who your birth parents were?

I still, before reaching out to her.

No one to hold through the pain.

Like me.

When Kade got me from those stairs that night, when he took me from the orphan house that treated werewolves like animals who belonged in cages...why I rarely shift, why I’m too afraid to let her out? Why she’s stopped clawing out? Why I stopped talking to her the way a werewolf was taught to do from such a young age? Like I was meant for something else but I never had a hand to hold. I needed that hand, I needed the support because I know exactly what it’s like to be alone in the blue hue and the darkness, chained to a bed just to be told I was too dangerous, that I wasn’t like the other kids.

I was an outsider.

I was abnormal and foreign, filthy and odd.

I was the outlier.

That’s what made me do this.

That’s what made me want to reach out to a girl who has been used for her curse, used each time these games open. If anyone could talk to her long enough not to choke on their own blood. I could relate to her pain, just from the other end of the channel. I didn’t know my mother and she didn’t get to know her daughter.

But a rough hand stops me and I still when Elias rips me up into a stand.

“What the hell are you doing here?!” I yell at him when he pulls me onto the grass, out of the cave, he’s alone. I watch him as he moves forward. He grabs my wrist, it’s cold, he’s freezing cold and I feared his skin alone would give me frost bite, if not for the fact it was sending tingles across my skin. I stare up at him, my mouth gaping open. He’s not wearing a cloak. He’s wearing some sort of advanced gear, all pitch black. I rip my arm from his, the tingles shoot up my spine as I stare at what should have been my professor, but looked more like a thirty-something year old male in good health. Stubble on his chin and slightly up his cheeks.

“What has happened to you?” I ask, not understanding how the hell it was possible that he had changed.

“I believe the better question revolves around what you’re doing with the blood witch.” He points to the cave, “She is manipulating you with that teddy bear.” He snaps at me.

“Manipulating how? She didn’t do anything!”

“If you had touched her then the fucking curse would be transferred to you! Do you have any idea what she’s done! Who she’s killed! She wasn’t cursed because of a miscarriage between a husband and wife, she was cursed and sent here because she’d drain the blood of children in her years as a hybrid of werewolf, vampire and witch. Because she would attempt to kill as many children born in the year of 1818 and she ruined countries. You touch her willingly and that transfers the curse onto you, you fucking idiot!”

I blink at him.

He looked ready to throttle me. Grabbing my upper arm, he shoves me out of the entrance to the games, we land back on the stage in the emptiness of it. Not a single person or creature in a seat as he drags me up a flight of stairs and pushes me out into the gardens. It was raining and the pounding of thunder echoed against my heartstrings, playing a rhythm that struck me vulnerable and unaware to what could have buried me, ”She’s red riding hood before she becomes the wolf." She’s sad and innocent, friendly and trusting...before she rips your limbs off for sport.

“You never trust anyone. Do you understand me? The one set of rules I taught you and you fell for her trap.” He argues with me, tramping through the wood and bark, the dirt and grime soaked by the cold rain that felt like sharpened knives on my head.

“Why were you following me?” I breathe out, unable to expand my lungs just for air.

“To stop what you were about to do.”

“You were shadowing me.” I spit.

“Protecting you, more like. Someone fucking has to.” God, he’s never sworn this much, the anger coming from the elder was vast, vengeful almost. I stare at all of him for a long second. He paces, angry, hardened. I fist my hand, wondering if this was the best time to ask, to learn more about the elementals, even when I was this close to becoming cursed as...I shiver. How could I have been so clueless? So easily sucked in.

“Are you so depressed that you would fall for that? The fox falling for bait, huh?!” He growls at me. I thought that if I could slap him, would he deal with it, or what he stop? Would he fight back?

I decide to be daring and I step up to him, clench a fist and punch him with a right hook. He stares at me for a long second. I whip my leg up to kick him between the legs, he shoves his hands down, stopping it and grabbing my waist. I yelp when he throws me over his goddamn shoulder. He holds my tight enough so I can’t knock my knee straight into his nose. I growl and punch at his back, thinking I’d find a weapon on him or something when I’m slammed down against the dirty floor and shocked to stunned disbelief when he grabs my arms and holds them about my head.

His eyes flash with a strange colour, mixed between a deep blue and a troubling mix of black.

They stare into mine in a way no one has stared at me before. It’s angry, but it’s slow and sensual. I tense under him, he’s straddling my hips, practically sitting on me as he lets my hands go. I didn’t like the hold and he released it. Sitting up, he doesn’t step away, “I know you’re hiding something.” He mutters. I wanted to spit right back at his face that he was doing the same thing, hiding something. But the trust wasn’t there. It’s always a lack of something. I couldn’t find myself to trust the man above me.

“Get off.” I tell him.

He leans forward, I frown when his fingers grip my chin lightly, tilting my head up, “You are foolish and idiotic.” He says to me.

“And you’re a nosey arsehole. We done?” I ask him.

He scoffs and lifts off me, calmed down now. I sit up and look at my clothes, “You fucking got dirt all over me.” I growl, standing and unable to get it all off, I looked like road kill right now.

“Your training will need to advance, clean up, starting from tomorrow. I’ll inform Nicolai of the changes in your schedule.” He couldn’t bloody do that—yet I watch Elias stomp away without a second glance sent in my measly direction.

I looked back at the stadium, she’d lied to me about the way she was cursed, it was a good tactic to lure me in. It was a good idea too. Luring someone in only to devastate them later, just for freedom, just for understanding. I pause when I see a line of people who clearly worked here moving towards the main hall for dinner. No one held that devastation or sadness I knew I felt deep down. The child in me who wanted to believe the blood witch. I even see in the bare glimpse of him, in the corner of my eye, the dancer I’d wronged so long ago. Happy with his daughter, talking amongst other dancers.

I felt the presence of the lycanthrope before he spotted me covered in mud.

His silver eyes tilt to the side, “Why were you rolling in the mud?” It was a dumb question.

I blink at him, “The blood witch almost made me switch her curse into...me.” I can’t help but say.

He stands there for a second, “What?” He says lowly, stepping forward and reaching for me.

I gesture to myself, still covered from head-to-toe in dirt, “You went to her, alone? Are you fucking insane?” He asks me, like it’s a legitimate question.

“Have you looked in a mirror?” I retort, sharply. I shouldn’t have been insulted. Stupid.

He raises an eyebrow at me, “We should get you cleaned up.” He initiates.

I don’t take his hand, he drops it to his side, first time not wanting to wrap it around me and once I finally get to the room, to change, all my mind can drift to and think about is why did she have to use me to remove the curse, if Elias was right in the way it works.

I was close to showing him today.

I was close to revealing the truth about something I didn’t want to accept.

And instead...I let him force me into a new position, no matter Elder Elias’s persistence.